Greenway Plaza selling to Atlanta company

Greenway Plaza is being sold to Cousins Properties (Crescent Real Estate Holdings)

The 10-building Greenway Plaza complex is being sold to Atlanta-based Cousins Properties.

The company is expected to buy the Houston complex and a 40-story office tower in downtown Fort Worth for $1.1 billion in cash, Cousins announced this afternoon. The seller is a joint venture operated by Fort Worth-based Crescent Real Estate Holdings. The acquisition is expected to close by mid-September.

Located along the Southwest Freeway on both sides of Edloe, Greenway Plaza contains 4.4 million square feet of space. The property is 92 percent occupied with below market rents, Cousins said. The Fort Worth office building being acquired is located at 777 Main St. and has 980,000 square feet. At the end of the year, occupancy is expected to be 72 percent.

Larry Gellerstedt, president and CEO of Cousins called the buildings “high-quality urban properties…with future development potential.”

“Not only do we expect this transaction to be transformative and accretive, it immediately expands our Texas platform and provides substantial geographic diversification at a significant discount to replacement cost,” Gellerstedt said in a statement.

Below market rents because it is an old property with abatement issues and dated spaces. It’s a nice place to office, but don’t kid yourself into thinking they stole it. It will cost them to improve it to raise rents. Crescent did a good job of managing what they had and are nice folks to work with.